Age of the City
-- A Financial Times Book of the Year -- Why our Future will be Won or Lost Together
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
One of the Financial Times' Best Economics Books of 2023
Visionary Oxford professor Ian Goldin and The Economist's Tom Lee-Devlin show why the city is where the battles of inequality, social division, pandemics and climate change must be faced.
From centres of antiquity like Athens or Rome to modern metropolises like New York or Shanghai, cities throughout history have been the engines of human progress and the epicentres of our greatest achievements. Now, for the first time, more than half of humanity lives in cities, a share that continues to rise. In the developing world, cities are growing at a rate never seen before.
In this book, Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin show why making our societies fairer, more cohesive and sustainable must start with our cities. Globalization and technological change have concentrated wealth into a small number of booming metropolises, leaving many smaller cities and towns behind and feeding populist resentment. Yet even within seemingly thriving cities like London or San Francisco, the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to widen and our retreat into online worlds tears away at our social fabric. Meanwhile, pandemics and climate change pose existential threats to our increasingly urban world.
Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin combine the lessons of history with a deep understanding of the challenges confronting our world today to show why cities are at a crossroads – and hold our destinies in the balance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Goldin (Rescue), an Oxford professor of globalization and development, and Economist correspondent Lee-Devlin extol in this poorly argued polemic the potential for urban development to solve many of society's ills. Cities are "now home to over half the global population... something never before seen in human history," the authors write, and they use this fact as a launchpad to argue that the urban development policies of today will seal the fate of future societies. They go on to outline how urban dynamism, which relies so much on the physical closeness of people, has suffered greatly due to the pandemic and the migration of daily activity into the digital realm, and thus cities must adapt or lose relevance. To address such challenges, Goldin and Lee-Devlin call for more investment in cities—better public transit and increased housing density, as well as more desirable accommodations for the "high-skill" employees of the tech industry. Unfortunately, their policy recommendations are often overly broad. For example, they call for "multiple layers of government... acting in concert with one another" and the "political courage... to find sensible solutions." This rallying cry comes up short.
